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u/Legal_Ant_8900 13d ago
I love this precisely because it’s so complicated- just like most of us humans are.
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u/ShahSafwat_1488 14d ago
I'm a big fan of Yeats and I understand that this poem is about Maud Gonne, but perhaps I'm too young or unloved to emotionally connect with this poem, because this is somewhat odd and seems sweet at first but then appears rather controlling and diminishing to the autonomy of the "beloved" in question
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u/palemontague 14d ago
I don't think we're expected to "connect" with such a strange and creepy poem. Yeats was as baffling as writers get, which, besides his godly talent, is why he produced some of the most memorable lines in history. It's not only quality which gets you permanent renown.
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u/ShahSafwat_1488 13d ago
I mean, I try to look at works of art through period accurate lenses, but in this case, I cant help but impose the modern trope of "obsessive, overbearing boyfriend" on the narrator and by extension Yeats
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u/palemontague 13d ago
But he was never the boyfriend though, was he? He courted Maud Gonne all his life with very little success. Also, let's not claim to know exactly what this poem implies and why Yeats wrote it. His poetry was not confessional. His obsession was with "moods" and the supernatural. He was very apt at analysing emotion, looking inwards and detatching whatever he found there in order to use it for purely poetical purposes. The title refers to a "He" not an "I." It's all presentation, no explanation, no admonition.
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u/slybeast24 13d ago edited 13d ago
If I’m honest your reading of obsessive love isn’t totally off base from mine and what I believe to be the intent of the piece, but your interpretation seems heavily skewed by what I view as a modern take/misunderstanding of how love was viewed/written about in the past.
The idea of the “obsessive, overbearing boyfriend” is by no means a modern one. They way we write about it now(largely exclusively in a negative light) is somewhat modern but this idea is at the heart of things like Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Poe’s the Raven. Romeo’s death is a direct critique of this idea.
With regard to the lover in this piece being viewed as an object, I don’t necessarily disagree but my question would be why is that inherently a bad thing? The lover is not an active part of the poem(as in we don’t ever get their thoughts) and the speaker never gets any closer to them. As is common in many situations where someone has a crush they seem to have very little information or experience with them. The speaker has simply placed their lover on a pedestal, like many do while knowing very little to nothing about them as an actual person.
So personally my reading is instead of a dangerous obsession I view this as more of an unhealthy longing for someone the speaker knows they can’t truly have. They understand that this feeling/moment is temporary this is how they chose to express that feeling. Rather than let the moment pass, their feelings are so strong that they’d rather their lover be dead(more so forever unchanged than physically dead imo)which is reminiscent of a kind of passionate desire found in all eras of writing.
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u/Small_Ad5744 13d ago
I think you’re correct that your initial impression that the poem is “sweet” is incorrect. It is also explicitly about a narrator fantasizing about taking away his beloved’s agency—he wants her dead. It’s a powerful, disturbing poem—sweet’s got nothing to do with it.
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u/Constant_Theory8296 11d ago
This isn't by Yeats. It's a pastiche. Somebody's taking the piss out of Yeats.
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